Tuesday, November 19, 2013

PATTULLO
TRAFFIC

According to the October 7th
Committee of the Whole meeting, a raft of reports, and just plain common sense,
tolls on the Port Mann Bridge have led to a significant increase in traffic on the Pattullo.

Much hand wringing ensued about what to do
about it. While there were a few
suggestions that could be implemented by the city (banning trucks on Royal
Avenue), most involved getting other people to do stuff (generally toll the
Pattullo).

I’m in favour of doing things yourself
rather than trying to pass the buck whenever possible. Electronic tolling gives us the ability to
take control of this issue at a municipal level. Legal authority may or may not, I haven’t delved
into that pit yet, but technically there is nothing stopping us from tolling
commuters or truckers through New West .

TOLLS

Tolls can be done a few different
ways. The traditional Canadian way is to
toll a specific asset. You pay a toll to
cross the Port Mann or Golden Ears bridge, to ride a ferry, and formerly to
drive the Coquihalla. The equivalent to
doing that here would be to toll that Pattullo Bridge, which is what some people are calling for.

Another way is a congestion charge,
basically charging vehicles to enter a specific zone in the city. London is probably most famous for this, but
Milan also does it, Singapore tested it, and a number of smaller European
cities have implemented it.

Both of these options have problems for
us. Before we get to those problems
though, we need to define what is our goal.
If we don’t define that well, we may end up implementing solutions that
only partially or weakly get us what we want, and may have side effects that
are more problematic that the problem was before.

GOALS

Based on council discussions, news
articles, and general bitching and whining, there is one thing everyone says
they want.

Reduce traffic volumes. Remember
the glorious days when the Pattullo was shut down for three weeks after the
fire? We want our car-free utopia back.

That’s the quick and easy answer. But the real answer is more subtle. What traffic do we want to reduce? Through traffic commuting to Burnaby or
Vancouver? Heck yes, slam that gate shut. Truck traffic on the way to various
ports? Don’t need it. Truck traffic to heavy industry or warehouses
in New West? Ummm….that might have some
consequences. Commuters going to or from
New West? Well, we’d like to get them on
transit but…. People coming in to
utilize New West businesses or services?
Crap - we’re only five questions in and this is already getting
hard.

What we probably want to do is some
combination of choking off through-town commuters, minimizing through truck
traffic, directing in-town truck traffic in a way that minimizes its impact on
everyone else, and allowing people and business to get in and out of New West
easily.

BACK
TO TOLLS

The problem with tolls is they are a
sledgehammer. Yes, you can tweak things
based on time of day, vehicle size, vehicle pollution, HOVs, but generally
speaking tolling comes down to cross this
line and you have to pay. That has the general result of making fewer
vehicles cross the line. Instead the go
around it (as the Port Mann bridge toll has shown us) or up to the edge of
it.

Sometimes that’s good. In the case of congestion charges, your end
goal is fewer vehicles on the road. The
toll-hammer works well for that – make it more expensive and fewer cars will
come.

In our case, we want to do something more
subtle. We want to direct some traffic
away, while at the same time keeping it as easy or easier for other types of
traffic to get in and out of town. The
miracle of electronic tolling offers us a potential solution.

GIVE
‘ER THE OLD IN-AND-OUT

The main problem people seem to have is
with the traffic that uses New West as a highway – vehicles that drive through
our city, congest and wear out our roads, and pollute our air while not paying
to support our infrastructure. We don’t
want to discourage those people coming to or from town, but if we can nudge
them onto transit it would be a bonus.

A bridge toll or congestion charge would
hit everyone. Sure, we’d discourage
commuters, but we’d also hit on people living here and coming here for
business. So let’s try and tweak the
system a little bit.

Let’s set up a toll system like you would
for a congestion charge. Track every
time a vehicle enters and exits the city zone.
Only rather than charging every vehicle that enters the city, just
charge the ones that come and go. Pick a
time, say an hour. Any vehicle that
enters town and leaves within one hour is an evil commuter whom we hate and gets
charged with the toll. Any vehicle that
stays at least an hour is a friendly patron and supporter off all things New
Westminster, so they don’t get charged.

While it’s not perfect, and would likely
miss some of the through traffic and hit some of the come to town traffic we
want, in general it should toll those vehicles using New West as a thoroughfare
while not hitting those coming to town.
It would be far more selective than a simple bridge toll or congestion
charge and thus should manage traffic closer to how we want it instead of just
slamming everyone.

PROBLEMS

It
will discourage people coming to New West on short trips for business

Yes this will discourage short trips for
business. To an extent, it will support
other goals by pushing some of those people onto transit rather than taking
their car. You could also mitigate this
to an extent by making a “from whence ye came” exemption – if a vehicle exits
the city by the same road it entered on it does not get tolled.

Congestion
from intentional delays

Make the time too short, and people will
game the system by entering town, parking on the side of the road somewhere
(maybe even *gasp* idling) until their time is up, then leaving. This would also aggravate the parking
situation. Solution? Extend the time you need to stay before the toll
is removed. However, there’s only so far
you can go with this before it becomes a defacto congestion charge. I’m willing to trust engineers and their
traffic models to pick an ideal time.

CONCLUSION

I’m just a simple engineer, so I’m sure
this is an idea that has been thought of in traffic circles before. My Google searching wasn’t able to come up
with anything, but I may not know the right words to search for. I would love to see if any studies, modelling
or tests have been done for a system along these lines. Even more so, I would love to see the city
take control of traffic on its roads. I
believe the technology is there to do it.